Mobilizing Cultural Identities in the First World War

Federica G. Pedriali is Professor of Literary Metatheory and Modern Italian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She is the Director of The Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies and the Italo-Scottish Research Cluster. She has published widely on the Italian literary canon and its margins, with applications from continental philosophy and biopolitics.Cristina Savettieri is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Italian Literature at the University of Pisa, Italy. From 2015 to 2017 she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where she carried out an EU-funded research project on gender and nationalism in WWI Italian literature.

“Mobilizing Cultural Identities in the First World War unites a wide range of insights and offers a useful reading for different audiences. Its multifaceted, transnational approach and the attention that is devoted to often overlooked aspects of the war are just two elements that contribute to the innovative character of the book. It is a refreshing and timely contribution to World War I scholarship which will undoubtedly inspire future research in the field of cultural studies and beyond.” (Eline Batsleer, Annali d'italianistica, Vol. 40, 2022)“The book showcases the vast range of scholarly work that the cultural study of the First World War can generate. If the richness of approaches may at times come to the detriment of the overall cohesion of the volume, this issueis widely compensated by the high quality of all of the contributions, wisely edited into compact thematic sections resulting in a book that solidly contributes to the interdisciplinary and intermedial ethos that informs today’s scholarship.” (Guido Bartolini, Modern Language Review, Vol. 117 (4), October, 2022)

• 1. Introduction- Cristina Savettieri and Federica G. Pedriali.- Part I: Political Identities.- 2. Classical Idealism and Political Action in the First World War: Jane Malloch and Henry Brailsford- Elizabeth Ellen Pender.- 3. Artists at War: Artistic Identities and the Politics of Culture in Post-World War I Italy- Simona Storchi.- Part II: Italian Masculinities.- 4. “The Genuine Family of My Extraordinary Youth”: Male Bonding in the Italian Literature of the First World War- Marco Mondini.- 5. Gender Trouble in Italian Narratives of Captivity of the First World War- Cristina Savettieri.- Part III: Conceptual Frameworks.- 6. Women, Heroism and the First World War- Angela Hobbs.- 7. Bared and Grievable. Theory Impossible in No Man’s Land- Federica G. Pedriali.- Part IV: Remembering.- 8. Croatia and the First World War. National Forgetting in a Memorial Shatter Zone?- Tea Sindbæk Andersen and Ismar Dedović.- 9. Witnessing the First World War in Britain: the Making of Modern Identities during the Centenary- Ross Wilson.